Useless Register
It’s here, it’s here, this is where the light renews itself.
ANTONIO RAMOS ROSA
There’s an intimate sigh
A returned glance
where your hands left their flakes
Very close to the face a mirror broken by so much waiting
And also the rust that stains pocket knives scissors and locks
The insect that sucks light from the light bulb
The babbling of what resists its own disappearance
The eyelash tangled in a whirlwind of dust
The ochre cummulus in an old man’s beard
The lost thread
The fluff of a suit that was never worn
and which slowly shrinks little by little
The letters of your name
rubbing themselves in a mosquito’s feet
Give a pale jump
over the splinters of a faded sun
toward the matter that resists
and transforms itself.
Paso en falso (2004)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo: Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
Showing posts with label Luis Enrique Belmonte. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Luis Enrique Belmonte. Show all posts
5.02.2015
La oscuridad / Luis Enrique Belmonte
Darkness
Is the book with torn-out pages.
Is the smoke that school buses emit.
Is the grimace of the moisturizing cream salesman.
Stalks you, licks your feet, offers you candy.
Is smoked, dreamed, and paid with credit.
Cuartos de alquiler (2005)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo: Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
Is the book with torn-out pages.
Is the smoke that school buses emit.
Is the grimace of the moisturizing cream salesman.
Stalks you, licks your feet, offers you candy.
Is smoked, dreamed, and paid with credit.
Cuartos de alquiler (2005)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo: Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
5.01.2015
Despedida / Luis Enrique Belmonte
Farewell
Signs in the clouds
For us
Hearts like morning bells
For us
Birds chirping horizons
For us
Cuartos de alquiler (2005)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo: Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
Signs in the clouds
For us
Hearts like morning bells
For us
Birds chirping horizons
For us
Cuartos de alquiler (2005)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo: Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
6.23.2014
Entrevista a Luis Enrique Belmonte: “El arte une y la ideología divide” / Miguel Chillida
An Interview with Luis Enrique Belmonte: “Art unites and ideology divides”
[Photo: Enio Perdomo]
Luis Enrique Belmonte is one of the most prominent poets of his generation. He was born in Caracas in 1971 and is a medical doctor who graduated from the Central University of Venezuela. He specialized in Bioethics at Ramón Llull University and History of the Sciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He has received, among other recognitions, the Fernando Paz Castillo Prize for Poetry (1996) for Cuerpo bajo lámpara, the Adonais Prize (1998) for Inútil registro and the Poetry Prize for the IV Mariano Picón Salas Biennial of Literature (2005) for El encanto. Miguel Chillida interviews him exclusively for Prodavinci.
Luis Enrique, Walter Benjamin has pointed out that “The purpose of the calendar was to unite the acknowledgment of a certain quality with the measurement of a certain quantity, since holidays, in some way, leave blank spaces for contemplation. Man misplaced from experience feels as though he is outside the calendar. The inhabitant of a big city gains access to the knowledge of that feeling on Sundays.” It is precisely in your book Inútil registro (1998), where time doesn’t pass and the days even revel in their stagnation, that a poem like “Los domingos” appears. Could you talk to us a little about life in the city and the passing of time from your experience as a poet and musician?
You’re right, Miguel, the topic of displacement is present in Inútil registro and in other phases of my poetry. The sensation of estrangement we experiment when we’re displaced generates a phenomenon that intrigues me. You can be displaced from what surrounds you or from yourself. Undone or depersonalized. Being displaced is a mental condition that reveals and unknown side of the world and of yourself. It seems to me that they have correspondences with the eccentric nature of human beings, that urge that impels us from the center to the margins, bordering the circle, on the periphery.
When we’re displaced we lose certainties and roots. And this, if we know how to assume it, is an extraordinary source of knowledge. Relatedly, Sundays and holidays are times that bring about sensations that are related to drifting, beyond everyday order, at the margin of the productive-consumerist forces of society. During holidays we can experience idleness, slowness, contemplation. They’re days that defy the operative and productive logic of the Western almanac. The eccentric nature and displacement are attributes of a rebellion against the finite, the predetermined, the calendar, the accounting of the days. Religion and political ideology have tried to regulate this matter. That’s why during holidays they impose on us church services, soccer games, military parades and proselytizing fairs. It seems to me that subsistence is richer and more infinite if spaces exist for displacement, wonder, the festive mood, the loss of roots and certainties.
In the poem “Elefantes,” from your first book Cuando me da por caracol (1994), the speaker has a vision of five elephants while he’s looking out a window. The poem says:
They’re looking for the hidden source
beneath the tip of the pencil
that drives this pachydermatous message.
What is beyond, in unreality, is revealed to the poet so that he might be the intermediary between that unreal world and conventional reality. But the revelation is produced in the everyday. Do you think it’s important that the poet learn how to see the extraordinary in the ordinary? What does that consist of?
Maybe seeing beyond the everyday is a natural activity for the imaginative consciousness. The imagination expands the limits of conventional reality and points to the extraordinary. Poetry is interested in the traces, not the evidence of reality. René Char used to say that only traces can make us dream. To imagine, to dream, to see beyond. If I’m walking down the street and I notice the paw prints of a dog in the cement, I could try to explore other realities through that image: Where might that dog be now? When did he pass by here? What did the workers say or do to him when he put his paws on the wet cement. In other words, to imagine, to see beyond the evidence of the real, this unveils a hidden and magical side of things. Many years ago, when I was studying for an M.A. in the History of the Sciences and researching the effects of the bubonic plague on the Medieval state of mind, I stumbled across a great discovery. The medical Galenism of the 14th century recommended avoiding fear and sadness during the plague, since such afflictions predisposed the body to falling into the physical-natural disaster. The medical regimes of Agramont and of Gentile de Foligno highlight the value of the Ymaginatio in compensating for the effects of the plague. A certain etymology attributes the origin of the word Ymaginatio to the predisposition and activity of the Roman sentinels who were stationed at the fortifications at night. The night sentinel has to be capable of anticipating and mentally representing a phenomenon that hasn’t occurred but could occur. From his guard post, the sentinel imagines the beyond, and he interprets, with vigilant attention, the signs that emerge from the darkness (the creaking of a branch, the sound of the wind, voices, footsteps, lights, etc.). The sentinel hast to maintain his serenity so he doesn’t succumb to desperation. I think about this when you talk about poetry’s capacity to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. It’s a predisposition that leads you to investigate the hidden side of what’s known, and to imagine what happens beyond the perceptive walls that habit imposes on us. So we return again to the eccentric nature of the human being, to the movement of expansion from what is ours toward what is foreign. The poet is a nocturnal sentinel.
I like what you say, Luis Enrique. Particularly with the image of the sentinel, which is so present in your work; not only as an image. In “Noches del Bósforo,” from your book Compañero paciente (2012), the speaker seems to be a sentinel who witnesses the passing of time, and that poem, precisely, is permeated by a Medieval imaginary. Relatedly, Georges Bataille has written that “we don’t know ourselves as differently and clearly as the first day we perceive ourselves from outside as an other. And this happens only under the condition that we have already distinguished the other first on the plane where fabricated things have appeared to us distinctly.” Those things, utensils, objects that surround us, are very present in your work, and not just the “useful” things but also the “useless ones.” No longer as “hierophanies”(Eliade), since the speaker of the poems is at his core a profane man. And yet there is an intuition, another dimension hidden behind those objects. Do you think that part of ourselves can be found in that dimension? (I’m thinking of the refrigerator in your novel Salvar los elefantes, 2007.) Could you explain all this to us a bit?
Definitely yes, Miguel, and how sharp of you to see it that way. Objects allow the transition between inside and outside. And vice versa. The object or its mental representation are present in my work as resources and processes through which I explore the relation of a particular subject with himself and with his surroundings. Objects can catalyze an action or catapult an image in a very effective manner. I remember how one time Gustavo Valle told me that my poetry was full of useless knickknacks. I like the word knickknack [cacharro]. Useless objects that have been knocked around and defy functional logic. So the anti-operative and anti-productive dimension of the poetic impulse appears once again. A dimension that’s political and at the same time an aesthetic exploration. The possibilities a knickknack can offer are vert attractive for an artist. Duchamp, Schwitters, Arman, Brossa (who gave me, by the way, his final interview), Boltanski and the entire current that emerges from the Ready Made are constant references for my work. In Salvar los elefantes, objects are correlatives and processes of what happens to the subject. The refrigerator, the fan, the carburetor, etc. Those objects from “outside” are introjected by the character and, like him, they wander off course in a type of existential-situational shipwreck. Maybe the cosmic ecstasy or fusion of the hierophanies occurs, in Salvar los elefantes, starting with the character’s identification with and projection towards the useless objects in his apartment. The domestic objects that surround us might form the most transcendent constellation to which we can have access in this world that is every day more de-spiritualized.
In one of his essays, André Breton said that artists shouldn’t subjugate themselves to any political ideology, but at the same time, as men, their political position, along with the characteristics of the historical moment they live, will be present in their work as “latent content.” Do you think this “latent content” is expressed in verses such as:
My childhood priest
explained the black sheep very well
you can’t swim against the current he told me
and I looked at his big belly and asked myself
if he could even float with that belly
Or in poems from Cuerpo bajo lámpara like “No se olviden de nosotros,” that begins with an epigraph from Carlos Germán Belli, that I reproduce below:
Because above
there are those who handle everything,
who write, who sing, who dance,
who speak beautifully,
and we, red from shame,
only want to disappear
in little pieces
I completely agree. There’s latent content in every act of communication. We can’t separate ourselves from the impression and the contingencies of the time we live in. I think the affinity for the eccentric in my poetry is already a political position. But I don’t think it’s adequate to confuse politics with ideology. An artist should defend the right to exist and create at the margins of any ideology or exploitation of thought. We’re back to the peripheral function of art. The political preacher seeks to convince by means of doctrine, while the artist seeks participation by means of enchantment. The ideological operator speaks to the masses and to the powerful. The artist speaks to beings and to small things. Ideological preaching inevitably leads to vengeance and to the robbery of power. The poetic word seeks communion in the diverse and in the participation of the other. That’s why art unites and ideology divides.
Perhaps that democratic aspect of art is also associated in your poetry with the feast, with the orgy. I’m thinking of Matadero (2002). Relatedly, I think that time has been abolished in your poetry, for example in poems like “Dónde estará mi cuerpo, dónde los días”, from Cuerpo bajo lámpara (1996). Do you think it has to do with what Charles Péguy observed in Victor-Marie, Comte Hugo? (“When he would look at the door to the street, and the doorstep, which is generally a carved stone, atop this stone he clearly distinguished the ancient line, the sacred threshold, because it is the very same line.”)
Wow, Miguel, that quotation is so enigmatic and precious. It reminds me of that verse of Eliot’s that says time past and time future might be gathered in the present. It makes me think of art’s utopia, of the rebellion against the finite, of the search for an alternate and atemporal current.
The experience of the reader is closely tied in your work to the experience of the writer, to the point that they could turn out to be the same thing. One of the images present in your work is “the yellow flower,” always associated with positive, pleasant aspects of life. I recall a short story by Julio Cortázar that’s called precisely “The Yellow Flower.” The protagonist tells his story to the other narrator in a bar. After he meets a child, who is him as a child, he worries that the story of his life will repeat itself. Later on the boy gets sick and dies, under his care; so then he feels relieved that his story won’t repeat itself. But one day while walking he stops to light a cigarette and sees a yellow flower, and it’s at that moment he intuits nothingness in the beauty of that flower. “I suddenly understood nothingness, what I had thought was peace, the end of the chain. I would die and Luc was already dead, there would never be a yellow flower again for someone like us, there wouldn’t be anything, there wouldn’t be absolutely anything, and that was nothingness, for a flower to never exist again.” I read your book Paso en falso (2004) and I stop at a poem like “¿Cuántas veces tiene que morir un hombre para estar muerto?”. The ephemeral, the transitory, even the organic decomposition of things and beings, and also the forgetting of those things and those beings, these are very important in your work. Could you talk to us about this?
My friend, the image of the yellow flower is very potent. I’ve been obsessed with it for a long time. I’m fascinated by those yellow flowers that grow in the cracks of cement in public. The image of a yellow flower is simple and profound. And it’s true that it’s present in my poetry. It has a solar nature, associated with festivity, with the happiness of spring, with pleasures, but at the same time it refers us to tempus fugit, to life’s ephemeral nature, to the fragility of our existence, to everything that happens and moves us precisely because it happens. A simple yellow flower reveals to us the mystery of existence, the celebration of life and the work of death. Reverdy said that at the core what is loved is what passes. The image of a yellow flower can summarize a poetics of transit, the commemoration of the beauty that surges from what is most fragile and ephemeral. I’m very moved that you’ve mentioned it.
Luis Enrique, how do you explain the ego of poets, if art is a struggle against this?
I think the artist’s ego is the consequence of a predictable risk of the job, since writing is a narcissistic exercise. The poet’s laboratory is himself. The images, words or sensations are recognized within, in the corners of the mind, in the basements where the consciousness tied to the real-conventional doesn’t reach. The poetic exercise leads to psychic excursions and to inner searching. Thus, part of the poet’s labor consists of submerging within himself to access symbols or meanings that are “his own” and that he’ll later on transform, by means of the alchemy of the word —and the calculated disorder of the senses— in common and communicable words. The poet checks personal materials in order to make them impersonal. And the deeper we explore, if the search is authentic, the more we find ourselves with the other, he himself. So I think true poetry is impersonal, even though it emerges from a personal experience. And it’s precisely there, in that delivery, where the poet’s ego is annulled to become part of the other. Now, if the poet stays locked in his self-contemplative and complacent shell, and praises himself constantly so as to compensate for certain failures, complexes or fears, well, he’ll probably produce very boring and innocuous poems. The best poets I’ve met don’t seem to be that way: even when they’re aware that writing is a narcissistic exercise, they don’t go around praising themselves and much less proclaiming themselves as special beings.
What about the state of mind of depression, in relation to the imaginative task?
As my friend and teacher Alfredo Silva Estrada would say, poetry is a state of waiting or a vigil for what will come. That state of expectation could, eventually, be associated with anguish, desperation or a terror of emptiness. Depression is an expectant desperation. The depressive constantly returns to what’s not there: he awaits and grows desperate about what will not come. Relatedly, the melancholic temperament leads us to a mood that contributes to a certain poetic vision of the world where life’s fragility and perishable nature is revealed. Thus, expectation and anguish when facing the finitude of beings and things could be related to some moments in poetic creation. Although I’d also like to think that the accomplished poem —a sensorial, expressive, communicable artifact— provides hope, since it gives us the chance to encounter the other.
Another preoccupation of this type among poets has been the Ivory Tower. What do you think about that?
The general notion exists of the solitary poet, removed from society, at the margins of everyone else. This perception has a real basis, which is the writing process, a slow process that demands silence and solitude. The other thing that sustains the notion of the solitary poet has to do with the very role of the poet in society, which for me is none other than to transit and register the margins of the world, the fleeting, the perishable, what we don’t see —or what we refuse to accept— because of the psychic routine imposed on us by the systems that rule human coexistence. But the flip side is that without the other the conformation of the subject is impossible. The poet doesn’t write for everyone else, he writes through everyone else. Without everyone else poetry makes no sense. It would be a sterile and onanistic exercise. And more than everyone else, the us would be the source that nourishes poetic writing and the place to which returns. Poetry begins with everyone else, goes into the self and emerges in the us.
In 2013 the first album by Viralata, in which you play the violin, was released. Tell us about that project and about your experience as “violinero”. (You’ve also musicalized some poems, for example “Cuando me da por caracol.”)
Music has always accompanied me. I think it’s the most spiritual form that matter can attain. In all the cities I’ve lived, I’ve always been taken in by musicians and artisans. Now, I’m not a professional violinist. I’m a violinero. José Manuel Briceño Guerrero used to say he preferred the violinero to the violinist. A violinist aims to exhibit his virtuosity. And he also makes a living from that. A violinero inserts himself in anthropological spaces related to collective celebration or with personal meditation. The violineros of the Andes, for example, pull out their violin after finishing their agricultural labor, and their practice is like a type of meditation at the end of the day. Or they might play when they’re high and they gather to liven the pagan and religious holidays of the town. The same thing happens with gypsy violineros and others. I identify with that social and extemporaneous function of music when it emerges in the contexts of celebration, enjoyment and communion. Recently, here in Caracas, I made an appearance with a great musician, Enio “Chicho” Escauriza, with whom I was exploring some sounds from Venezuela and making music to bewilder the mind. At the moment I have close partners in a psych folk musical project called Viralata, which means street dog in Portuguese. I sometimes think music and poetry are the same thing. And I’m grateful for your generosity in inviting me to engage in a dialogue based on my work with poetry. I think this is the most entertaining and empathetic interview I’ve been a part of. I enjoyed it a lot. Thank you.
Here are some links to access the music we make: the Viralata account on Soundcloud and on YouTube. Or you can listen to the project Magicomio.
{ Miguel Chillida, Prodavinci, 20 June 2014 }
Luis Enrique Belmonte is one of the most prominent poets of his generation. He was born in Caracas in 1971 and is a medical doctor who graduated from the Central University of Venezuela. He specialized in Bioethics at Ramón Llull University and History of the Sciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He has received, among other recognitions, the Fernando Paz Castillo Prize for Poetry (1996) for Cuerpo bajo lámpara, the Adonais Prize (1998) for Inútil registro and the Poetry Prize for the IV Mariano Picón Salas Biennial of Literature (2005) for El encanto. Miguel Chillida interviews him exclusively for Prodavinci.
Luis Enrique, Walter Benjamin has pointed out that “The purpose of the calendar was to unite the acknowledgment of a certain quality with the measurement of a certain quantity, since holidays, in some way, leave blank spaces for contemplation. Man misplaced from experience feels as though he is outside the calendar. The inhabitant of a big city gains access to the knowledge of that feeling on Sundays.” It is precisely in your book Inútil registro (1998), where time doesn’t pass and the days even revel in their stagnation, that a poem like “Los domingos” appears. Could you talk to us a little about life in the city and the passing of time from your experience as a poet and musician?
You’re right, Miguel, the topic of displacement is present in Inútil registro and in other phases of my poetry. The sensation of estrangement we experiment when we’re displaced generates a phenomenon that intrigues me. You can be displaced from what surrounds you or from yourself. Undone or depersonalized. Being displaced is a mental condition that reveals and unknown side of the world and of yourself. It seems to me that they have correspondences with the eccentric nature of human beings, that urge that impels us from the center to the margins, bordering the circle, on the periphery.
When we’re displaced we lose certainties and roots. And this, if we know how to assume it, is an extraordinary source of knowledge. Relatedly, Sundays and holidays are times that bring about sensations that are related to drifting, beyond everyday order, at the margin of the productive-consumerist forces of society. During holidays we can experience idleness, slowness, contemplation. They’re days that defy the operative and productive logic of the Western almanac. The eccentric nature and displacement are attributes of a rebellion against the finite, the predetermined, the calendar, the accounting of the days. Religion and political ideology have tried to regulate this matter. That’s why during holidays they impose on us church services, soccer games, military parades and proselytizing fairs. It seems to me that subsistence is richer and more infinite if spaces exist for displacement, wonder, the festive mood, the loss of roots and certainties.
In the poem “Elefantes,” from your first book Cuando me da por caracol (1994), the speaker has a vision of five elephants while he’s looking out a window. The poem says:
They’re looking for the hidden source
beneath the tip of the pencil
that drives this pachydermatous message.
What is beyond, in unreality, is revealed to the poet so that he might be the intermediary between that unreal world and conventional reality. But the revelation is produced in the everyday. Do you think it’s important that the poet learn how to see the extraordinary in the ordinary? What does that consist of?
Maybe seeing beyond the everyday is a natural activity for the imaginative consciousness. The imagination expands the limits of conventional reality and points to the extraordinary. Poetry is interested in the traces, not the evidence of reality. René Char used to say that only traces can make us dream. To imagine, to dream, to see beyond. If I’m walking down the street and I notice the paw prints of a dog in the cement, I could try to explore other realities through that image: Where might that dog be now? When did he pass by here? What did the workers say or do to him when he put his paws on the wet cement. In other words, to imagine, to see beyond the evidence of the real, this unveils a hidden and magical side of things. Many years ago, when I was studying for an M.A. in the History of the Sciences and researching the effects of the bubonic plague on the Medieval state of mind, I stumbled across a great discovery. The medical Galenism of the 14th century recommended avoiding fear and sadness during the plague, since such afflictions predisposed the body to falling into the physical-natural disaster. The medical regimes of Agramont and of Gentile de Foligno highlight the value of the Ymaginatio in compensating for the effects of the plague. A certain etymology attributes the origin of the word Ymaginatio to the predisposition and activity of the Roman sentinels who were stationed at the fortifications at night. The night sentinel has to be capable of anticipating and mentally representing a phenomenon that hasn’t occurred but could occur. From his guard post, the sentinel imagines the beyond, and he interprets, with vigilant attention, the signs that emerge from the darkness (the creaking of a branch, the sound of the wind, voices, footsteps, lights, etc.). The sentinel hast to maintain his serenity so he doesn’t succumb to desperation. I think about this when you talk about poetry’s capacity to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. It’s a predisposition that leads you to investigate the hidden side of what’s known, and to imagine what happens beyond the perceptive walls that habit imposes on us. So we return again to the eccentric nature of the human being, to the movement of expansion from what is ours toward what is foreign. The poet is a nocturnal sentinel.
I like what you say, Luis Enrique. Particularly with the image of the sentinel, which is so present in your work; not only as an image. In “Noches del Bósforo,” from your book Compañero paciente (2012), the speaker seems to be a sentinel who witnesses the passing of time, and that poem, precisely, is permeated by a Medieval imaginary. Relatedly, Georges Bataille has written that “we don’t know ourselves as differently and clearly as the first day we perceive ourselves from outside as an other. And this happens only under the condition that we have already distinguished the other first on the plane where fabricated things have appeared to us distinctly.” Those things, utensils, objects that surround us, are very present in your work, and not just the “useful” things but also the “useless ones.” No longer as “hierophanies”(Eliade), since the speaker of the poems is at his core a profane man. And yet there is an intuition, another dimension hidden behind those objects. Do you think that part of ourselves can be found in that dimension? (I’m thinking of the refrigerator in your novel Salvar los elefantes, 2007.) Could you explain all this to us a bit?
Definitely yes, Miguel, and how sharp of you to see it that way. Objects allow the transition between inside and outside. And vice versa. The object or its mental representation are present in my work as resources and processes through which I explore the relation of a particular subject with himself and with his surroundings. Objects can catalyze an action or catapult an image in a very effective manner. I remember how one time Gustavo Valle told me that my poetry was full of useless knickknacks. I like the word knickknack [cacharro]. Useless objects that have been knocked around and defy functional logic. So the anti-operative and anti-productive dimension of the poetic impulse appears once again. A dimension that’s political and at the same time an aesthetic exploration. The possibilities a knickknack can offer are vert attractive for an artist. Duchamp, Schwitters, Arman, Brossa (who gave me, by the way, his final interview), Boltanski and the entire current that emerges from the Ready Made are constant references for my work. In Salvar los elefantes, objects are correlatives and processes of what happens to the subject. The refrigerator, the fan, the carburetor, etc. Those objects from “outside” are introjected by the character and, like him, they wander off course in a type of existential-situational shipwreck. Maybe the cosmic ecstasy or fusion of the hierophanies occurs, in Salvar los elefantes, starting with the character’s identification with and projection towards the useless objects in his apartment. The domestic objects that surround us might form the most transcendent constellation to which we can have access in this world that is every day more de-spiritualized.
In one of his essays, André Breton said that artists shouldn’t subjugate themselves to any political ideology, but at the same time, as men, their political position, along with the characteristics of the historical moment they live, will be present in their work as “latent content.” Do you think this “latent content” is expressed in verses such as:
My childhood priest
explained the black sheep very well
you can’t swim against the current he told me
and I looked at his big belly and asked myself
if he could even float with that belly
Or in poems from Cuerpo bajo lámpara like “No se olviden de nosotros,” that begins with an epigraph from Carlos Germán Belli, that I reproduce below:
Because above
there are those who handle everything,
who write, who sing, who dance,
who speak beautifully,
and we, red from shame,
only want to disappear
in little pieces
I completely agree. There’s latent content in every act of communication. We can’t separate ourselves from the impression and the contingencies of the time we live in. I think the affinity for the eccentric in my poetry is already a political position. But I don’t think it’s adequate to confuse politics with ideology. An artist should defend the right to exist and create at the margins of any ideology or exploitation of thought. We’re back to the peripheral function of art. The political preacher seeks to convince by means of doctrine, while the artist seeks participation by means of enchantment. The ideological operator speaks to the masses and to the powerful. The artist speaks to beings and to small things. Ideological preaching inevitably leads to vengeance and to the robbery of power. The poetic word seeks communion in the diverse and in the participation of the other. That’s why art unites and ideology divides.
Perhaps that democratic aspect of art is also associated in your poetry with the feast, with the orgy. I’m thinking of Matadero (2002). Relatedly, I think that time has been abolished in your poetry, for example in poems like “Dónde estará mi cuerpo, dónde los días”, from Cuerpo bajo lámpara (1996). Do you think it has to do with what Charles Péguy observed in Victor-Marie, Comte Hugo? (“When he would look at the door to the street, and the doorstep, which is generally a carved stone, atop this stone he clearly distinguished the ancient line, the sacred threshold, because it is the very same line.”)
Wow, Miguel, that quotation is so enigmatic and precious. It reminds me of that verse of Eliot’s that says time past and time future might be gathered in the present. It makes me think of art’s utopia, of the rebellion against the finite, of the search for an alternate and atemporal current.
The experience of the reader is closely tied in your work to the experience of the writer, to the point that they could turn out to be the same thing. One of the images present in your work is “the yellow flower,” always associated with positive, pleasant aspects of life. I recall a short story by Julio Cortázar that’s called precisely “The Yellow Flower.” The protagonist tells his story to the other narrator in a bar. After he meets a child, who is him as a child, he worries that the story of his life will repeat itself. Later on the boy gets sick and dies, under his care; so then he feels relieved that his story won’t repeat itself. But one day while walking he stops to light a cigarette and sees a yellow flower, and it’s at that moment he intuits nothingness in the beauty of that flower. “I suddenly understood nothingness, what I had thought was peace, the end of the chain. I would die and Luc was already dead, there would never be a yellow flower again for someone like us, there wouldn’t be anything, there wouldn’t be absolutely anything, and that was nothingness, for a flower to never exist again.” I read your book Paso en falso (2004) and I stop at a poem like “¿Cuántas veces tiene que morir un hombre para estar muerto?”. The ephemeral, the transitory, even the organic decomposition of things and beings, and also the forgetting of those things and those beings, these are very important in your work. Could you talk to us about this?
My friend, the image of the yellow flower is very potent. I’ve been obsessed with it for a long time. I’m fascinated by those yellow flowers that grow in the cracks of cement in public. The image of a yellow flower is simple and profound. And it’s true that it’s present in my poetry. It has a solar nature, associated with festivity, with the happiness of spring, with pleasures, but at the same time it refers us to tempus fugit, to life’s ephemeral nature, to the fragility of our existence, to everything that happens and moves us precisely because it happens. A simple yellow flower reveals to us the mystery of existence, the celebration of life and the work of death. Reverdy said that at the core what is loved is what passes. The image of a yellow flower can summarize a poetics of transit, the commemoration of the beauty that surges from what is most fragile and ephemeral. I’m very moved that you’ve mentioned it.
Luis Enrique, how do you explain the ego of poets, if art is a struggle against this?
I think the artist’s ego is the consequence of a predictable risk of the job, since writing is a narcissistic exercise. The poet’s laboratory is himself. The images, words or sensations are recognized within, in the corners of the mind, in the basements where the consciousness tied to the real-conventional doesn’t reach. The poetic exercise leads to psychic excursions and to inner searching. Thus, part of the poet’s labor consists of submerging within himself to access symbols or meanings that are “his own” and that he’ll later on transform, by means of the alchemy of the word —and the calculated disorder of the senses— in common and communicable words. The poet checks personal materials in order to make them impersonal. And the deeper we explore, if the search is authentic, the more we find ourselves with the other, he himself. So I think true poetry is impersonal, even though it emerges from a personal experience. And it’s precisely there, in that delivery, where the poet’s ego is annulled to become part of the other. Now, if the poet stays locked in his self-contemplative and complacent shell, and praises himself constantly so as to compensate for certain failures, complexes or fears, well, he’ll probably produce very boring and innocuous poems. The best poets I’ve met don’t seem to be that way: even when they’re aware that writing is a narcissistic exercise, they don’t go around praising themselves and much less proclaiming themselves as special beings.
What about the state of mind of depression, in relation to the imaginative task?
As my friend and teacher Alfredo Silva Estrada would say, poetry is a state of waiting or a vigil for what will come. That state of expectation could, eventually, be associated with anguish, desperation or a terror of emptiness. Depression is an expectant desperation. The depressive constantly returns to what’s not there: he awaits and grows desperate about what will not come. Relatedly, the melancholic temperament leads us to a mood that contributes to a certain poetic vision of the world where life’s fragility and perishable nature is revealed. Thus, expectation and anguish when facing the finitude of beings and things could be related to some moments in poetic creation. Although I’d also like to think that the accomplished poem —a sensorial, expressive, communicable artifact— provides hope, since it gives us the chance to encounter the other.
Another preoccupation of this type among poets has been the Ivory Tower. What do you think about that?
The general notion exists of the solitary poet, removed from society, at the margins of everyone else. This perception has a real basis, which is the writing process, a slow process that demands silence and solitude. The other thing that sustains the notion of the solitary poet has to do with the very role of the poet in society, which for me is none other than to transit and register the margins of the world, the fleeting, the perishable, what we don’t see —or what we refuse to accept— because of the psychic routine imposed on us by the systems that rule human coexistence. But the flip side is that without the other the conformation of the subject is impossible. The poet doesn’t write for everyone else, he writes through everyone else. Without everyone else poetry makes no sense. It would be a sterile and onanistic exercise. And more than everyone else, the us would be the source that nourishes poetic writing and the place to which returns. Poetry begins with everyone else, goes into the self and emerges in the us.
In 2013 the first album by Viralata, in which you play the violin, was released. Tell us about that project and about your experience as “violinero”. (You’ve also musicalized some poems, for example “Cuando me da por caracol.”)
Music has always accompanied me. I think it’s the most spiritual form that matter can attain. In all the cities I’ve lived, I’ve always been taken in by musicians and artisans. Now, I’m not a professional violinist. I’m a violinero. José Manuel Briceño Guerrero used to say he preferred the violinero to the violinist. A violinist aims to exhibit his virtuosity. And he also makes a living from that. A violinero inserts himself in anthropological spaces related to collective celebration or with personal meditation. The violineros of the Andes, for example, pull out their violin after finishing their agricultural labor, and their practice is like a type of meditation at the end of the day. Or they might play when they’re high and they gather to liven the pagan and religious holidays of the town. The same thing happens with gypsy violineros and others. I identify with that social and extemporaneous function of music when it emerges in the contexts of celebration, enjoyment and communion. Recently, here in Caracas, I made an appearance with a great musician, Enio “Chicho” Escauriza, with whom I was exploring some sounds from Venezuela and making music to bewilder the mind. At the moment I have close partners in a psych folk musical project called Viralata, which means street dog in Portuguese. I sometimes think music and poetry are the same thing. And I’m grateful for your generosity in inviting me to engage in a dialogue based on my work with poetry. I think this is the most entertaining and empathetic interview I’ve been a part of. I enjoyed it a lot. Thank you.
Here are some links to access the music we make: the Viralata account on Soundcloud and on YouTube. Or you can listen to the project Magicomio.
{ Miguel Chillida, Prodavinci, 20 June 2014 }
7.10.2012
“La poesía es una forma de vivir” - Entrevista Luis Enrique Belmonte, poeta / Daniel Fermín
“Poetry is a way of life” - Interview with Luis Enrique Belmonte, Poet
The Venezuelan poet took a few elements from his job and applied them to his verses. “I realized that psychiatry is related to writing. Not on a thematic level, but in terms of other tools. Clinical observation, for example, is something that has elements of the poetic. As well as attentive listening,” said the writer, who has published six previous books.
The author of Inútil registro sees literature as a psychedelic experience, as a form of revealing the mind’s content. However, he doesn’t assume it as self-therapy. “People say that poets don’t need psychoanalysis. I understand that it can be, at certain times, a means of exploration, but it’s not therapy. I think it can be, actually, a risky career. Poetry is sometimes nourished by states of psychic turbulence,” added the writer.
Belmonte’s last book was Salvar a los elefantes, a short novel. That incursion into fiction perhaps led him to the prose-like verses that predominate in his most recent book, which was published by Lugar Común. “The collection has a tone that leans toward fiction. I don’t know if it was because of that novel. Many of my poems have those registers. I make a more communicative, more discursive poem. I’ve always had an approximation to prose.”
The author himself had already said that Compañero paciente is one of those books that he’s enjoyed writing. “I really liked how, unconsciously, it’s very oriented toward the more fraternal aspects of life. That seemed pleasant to me. To think of a book that’s about the fraternity of beings, with friendship amidst the circumstances the poetic subject encounters.”
In the book he offers a portrait of the solidarity that exists among patients (“He says that when things get bad / one forgets they can get worse,” page 25), or the life of an anatomist (who is “dying several times without finally dying,” page 41). He also offers a section in which he gives advice to street dogs (“Don’t complain so much about hunger: keep looking, you always find something,” page 83, or “Read Cervantes in a kennel,” page 81). “I think there are many processes of healing tied to this book. I think we can conceive of poetry as a means of preparing for life. And life is tied to death. Poetry is a way of life,” explained the winner of Spain’s Adonais Prize for Poetry in 1998.
Belmonte also won, in Venezuela in 1996, the Fernando Paz Castillo Poetry Prize. And in an old interview he said prizes can interrupt the course of a budding voice. It happened to him. “It distracted me a bit. Suddenly you’re no longer anonymous, you begin to receive accolades that don’t let you focus on the process of writing. The ideal condition for a writer is solitude or anonymity. Or the anonymity that solitude grants.”
Since then he publishes very little. Or much less than before. It took him five years to write Compañero paciente. “It has to do with a more mature awareness of the responsibility of saying. And one still doubts. I corrected this book until the day it was sent to the printer (a copy in his house has corrections marked with a pen). That’s when I understood you never finish a book, but instead say goodbye to it,” concluded Belmonte. Poetry requires patience.
{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 6 July 2012 }
(Photo: Enio Perdomo)One morning in the 90s, Luis Enrique Belmonte (Caracas, 1971) skipped an exam at the Escuela de Medicina to read César Vallejo. This is how the doctor began his relationship with literature, which opens a new chapter with the publication of Compañero paciente, a collection of poems that’s nourished by his experience as a psychiatrist in order to assume an empathetic view toward suffering. Proof that poetry can also be therapeutic.
The Venezuelan poet took a few elements from his job and applied them to his verses. “I realized that psychiatry is related to writing. Not on a thematic level, but in terms of other tools. Clinical observation, for example, is something that has elements of the poetic. As well as attentive listening,” said the writer, who has published six previous books.
The author of Inútil registro sees literature as a psychedelic experience, as a form of revealing the mind’s content. However, he doesn’t assume it as self-therapy. “People say that poets don’t need psychoanalysis. I understand that it can be, at certain times, a means of exploration, but it’s not therapy. I think it can be, actually, a risky career. Poetry is sometimes nourished by states of psychic turbulence,” added the writer.
Belmonte’s last book was Salvar a los elefantes, a short novel. That incursion into fiction perhaps led him to the prose-like verses that predominate in his most recent book, which was published by Lugar Común. “The collection has a tone that leans toward fiction. I don’t know if it was because of that novel. Many of my poems have those registers. I make a more communicative, more discursive poem. I’ve always had an approximation to prose.”
The author himself had already said that Compañero paciente is one of those books that he’s enjoyed writing. “I really liked how, unconsciously, it’s very oriented toward the more fraternal aspects of life. That seemed pleasant to me. To think of a book that’s about the fraternity of beings, with friendship amidst the circumstances the poetic subject encounters.”
In the book he offers a portrait of the solidarity that exists among patients (“He says that when things get bad / one forgets they can get worse,” page 25), or the life of an anatomist (who is “dying several times without finally dying,” page 41). He also offers a section in which he gives advice to street dogs (“Don’t complain so much about hunger: keep looking, you always find something,” page 83, or “Read Cervantes in a kennel,” page 81). “I think there are many processes of healing tied to this book. I think we can conceive of poetry as a means of preparing for life. And life is tied to death. Poetry is a way of life,” explained the winner of Spain’s Adonais Prize for Poetry in 1998.
Belmonte also won, in Venezuela in 1996, the Fernando Paz Castillo Poetry Prize. And in an old interview he said prizes can interrupt the course of a budding voice. It happened to him. “It distracted me a bit. Suddenly you’re no longer anonymous, you begin to receive accolades that don’t let you focus on the process of writing. The ideal condition for a writer is solitude or anonymity. Or the anonymity that solitude grants.”
Since then he publishes very little. Or much less than before. It took him five years to write Compañero paciente. “It has to do with a more mature awareness of the responsibility of saying. And one still doubts. I corrected this book until the day it was sent to the printer (a copy in his house has corrections marked with a pen). That’s when I understood you never finish a book, but instead say goodbye to it,” concluded Belmonte. Poetry requires patience.
{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 6 July 2012 }
11.20.2010
El pájaro de la esperanza / Luis Enrique Belmonte
The Bird of Hope
They marked the door with knife stabs,
belched out our names,
spit on the mailboxes,
threw sulfur in the garden.
But we,
we wove the blankets.
We were singing at a whisper, in the dark.
Pale,
bathed in dust,
we kept
scraping the floor.
Inside there was a bird that shivered
injured, blind, soaked.
Vendrá otra larga travesía (2006)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
They marked the door with knife stabs,
belched out our names,
spit on the mailboxes,
threw sulfur in the garden.
But we,
we wove the blankets.
We were singing at a whisper, in the dark.
Pale,
bathed in dust,
we kept
scraping the floor.
Inside there was a bird that shivered
injured, blind, soaked.
Vendrá otra larga travesía (2006)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
11.18.2010
Pasadizo / Luis Enrique Belmonte
Passageway
The owls arrived.
In the blackest part of night,
when only bodies
hardly illuminate.
***
It was a macabre song
like the chipped tooth in the sink,
like the handcuffed man stumbling,
like the shoe in the ditch.
***
But the bodies kept
lighting the transit.
Bodies entwined,
bodies dreaming,
bodies with a hummingbird inside.
***
A light
in the passageway wandered
by the living who got lost
chasing a strange aroma
and the dead who return
for a piece of bread.
***
The passageway,
the scream of the rooster,
the day’s sting,
the gleam of the new world
in your eyes that open.
Vendrá otra larga travesía (2006)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
The owls arrived.
In the blackest part of night,
when only bodies
hardly illuminate.
***
It was a macabre song
like the chipped tooth in the sink,
like the handcuffed man stumbling,
like the shoe in the ditch.
***
But the bodies kept
lighting the transit.
Bodies entwined,
bodies dreaming,
bodies with a hummingbird inside.
***
A light
in the passageway wandered
by the living who got lost
chasing a strange aroma
and the dead who return
for a piece of bread.
***
The passageway,
the scream of the rooster,
the day’s sting,
the gleam of the new world
in your eyes that open.
Vendrá otra larga travesía (2006)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
11.17.2010
Canción que no se olvida / Luis Enrique Belmonte
Song You Don’t Forget
I don’t want to touch you as though it were the last time.
And it won’t be the last time. I’ve been told
by the foxes that cross secretly along the highway.
Another long voyage will come.
Roads, windows will come,
your signals in telephone booths.
Crabs will emerge from the room
starving for nights and bedsheets.
I’ll keep in my pockets
the crumbs from your bread, the wool from your socks.
And time will weave blankets for the encounter.
And the song you don’t forget will be heard.
Vendrá otra larga travesía (2006)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
I don’t want to touch you as though it were the last time.
And it won’t be the last time. I’ve been told
by the foxes that cross secretly along the highway.
Another long voyage will come.
Roads, windows will come,
your signals in telephone booths.
Crabs will emerge from the room
starving for nights and bedsheets.
I’ll keep in my pockets
the crumbs from your bread, the wool from your socks.
And time will weave blankets for the encounter.
And the song you don’t forget will be heard.
Vendrá otra larga travesía (2006)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
11.16.2010
Paso en falso / Luis Enrique Belmonte
False Step
The tenants are arriving
with their bitten bread under their arm.
Someone calls me from the roof.
I go up a stair that creaks like toast.
A weak light drains under the doors:
there are anonymous crimes plotted with patience,
to the beat of a sewing machine.
My girlfriend, on the roof, shakes her lace.
My girlfriend invites me to stroll along the cornices.
At this hour I assume all betrayals, all the pages
vainly pecked, all the tightrope walker’s risks.
One false step will make of me
the chill that jolts the sleepers.
One false step will make of me a procession of souls
that will drink –without anyone noticing–
the water from the forgotten cups
on the little night tables.
Paso en falso (2004)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
The tenants are arriving
with their bitten bread under their arm.
Someone calls me from the roof.
I go up a stair that creaks like toast.
A weak light drains under the doors:
there are anonymous crimes plotted with patience,
to the beat of a sewing machine.
My girlfriend, on the roof, shakes her lace.
My girlfriend invites me to stroll along the cornices.
At this hour I assume all betrayals, all the pages
vainly pecked, all the tightrope walker’s risks.
One false step will make of me
the chill that jolts the sleepers.
One false step will make of me a procession of souls
that will drink –without anyone noticing–
the water from the forgotten cups
on the little night tables.
Paso en falso (2004)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
3.12.2010
Elefantes y desapariciones: Una novela de Luis Enrique Belmonte / Gabriel Payares
Elephants and Disappearances: A Novel by Luis Enrique Belmonte
I began to work as an artist when I began to be an adult, when I understood that my childhood was finished, and was dead. I think we all have somebody who is dead inside of us. A dead child.
–Christian Boltanski
The phrase is almost a cliché, but that doesn’t make it false: the end of childhood is the beginning of the end of life, the first step toward aging and death. Only after we have overcome childhood do we gain an awareness of death: first in relation to our parents and, eventually, through this discovery, of our own. The task of art –and of literature in particular–, when facing such a rough panorama of life, is none other than to provide man with an instant of recuperation of that lost initial stage, of that dead child mentioned in our epigraph; this is why Bataille affirmed of literature that it is “childhood finally regained.” Art, then, is a constant search for the ontology of the human, which is presumed to be lost with childhood: whether it be to preserve it, to spread it, to question it, or even to unveil it, to find the human element in reality’s most unusual corners. This, along with the awareness of one’s own finitude, and above all the capacity to visualize one’s own absence, to prepare us for it and to leave a legacy, makes art a particular disposition of the individual toward the coming absence, that is, man’s preparation for death: his own and that of others.
Such a poetics of disappearance animates the pages of the first work of fiction by the poet Luis Enrique Belmonte, the novella Salvar los elefantes (Caracas: Equinoccio, 2006). In its pages, the hot Catalonian summer serves as the ideal stage to illustrate the gradual dissipation of the world, the slow melting of a humanity that is broken and tied to itself, symbolically summarized by the protagonist’s damaged refrigerator, and at the same time transmuted, by means of media deception and televised simulacra, into the poor little African elephants that the Sheldrick Foundation promises to save.
In this manner, the anonymous protagonist of Salvar los elefantes plays the role of audience to a cruel performance of disappearance: trapped between the warm agony of his refrigerator, which exudes the stench of its own decomposition onto everything around it –a strange smell “of fermented mayonnaise” (p. 10) sticks to the striped pajamas the protagonist wears–, and the prolonged academic trip of his girlfriend Evelyne, from whom he will barely receive a couple of postcards with increasingly terse phrases –as if she herself were slowly dissipating–, the narrator seems to become more and more linked to a group of absent characters, dead, or in a steep trance toward disappearance, leaving behind the more “alive” or palpitating dynamics of existence: beginning with his anodyne sleepiness, a type of renunciation of a vital posture in the face of life –maybe only interrupted by his brief attempt to exercise by swimming, which logically culminates with a near-drowning–, and later on with his constant reference to (and even his dialogue with) actual characters whose deaths occurred amid intriguing conditions of sudden dissipation.
Thus the objects of his continuous reflection include the celebrated disappearances of Chet Baker, who died under suspicious circumstances after falling from a window in Amsterdam, or Saint Exupéry, who disappeared without a trace in a Lightning P38 airplane flying over the coast of Marseilles; along with those of several neighbors in the Barcelona neighborhood where he lives: Mrs. Cremer, consumed by the heat, or the neighbor dressed in pajamas with little snakes and arabesques. Something similar happens with the character Dumont the antiques dealer, a sort of imaginary friend to the narrator –an homage or reference to the first known aviator, the Brazilian Alberto Salas Dumont, whose suicide by hanging remains clouded by uncertain details–; and with Dr. Boltanski, the narrator’s psychiatrist –whose surname references the Jewish artist Christian Boltanski, famous for his tireless exploration of the themes of death, memory and disappearance in his many works and performances.
The experience of absence, then, takes place in the very writing of the story, understood as a type of detective work in which the aforementioned clues point not to a restitution of memory or of legacy, as would be the case in Boltanski’s installations, but rather to the consummation of disappearance itself: as though the very act of writing were providing an account of forgotten details about and by the absent ones. Writing as a remainder, a retelling of what endures, but at the same time the story of the disappearance of the writer himself. This meta-discourse makes its appearance within Belmonte’s narrative, present in the photos the protagonist obtains from an abandoned roll of film, and which exhibit the sequence of a photographic calendar of a man’s disappearance. It is a trace, undoubtedly, because the photos are the testimony of something that existed, but a trace that leads to a definitive absence, and from whose reading the narrator extracts the conclusion that, the more perfect the disappearances, the fewer traces of themselves they leave behind, the more impossible will be the existence of magic, art and writing:
How many of us haven’t felt disappointed when, at the disappearance of a dove or a parrot, the magician has been incapable of hiding the feathers that remain at the bottom of his top hat? It’s true that it would be very difficult to disappear into thin air, and that without the traces that bodies in transit leave behind detective stories wouldn’t be possible. Auguste Dupin wouldn’t have invented the police genre had it not been for the carelessness, almost always involuntary, of the turncoats. To hide the tracks, or to erase them, is one of the greatest challenges for anyone with the intention –the vocation– of disappearing. (p. 80)
Listening to the narrator himself, the novella is followed by a brief “Report Regarding the Absent,” which offers the reader various additional clues regarding certain referents that could be considered “lost” within the story. However, these annexes in the form of short stories run the risk of being unnecessary details: weakening the whole with their lack of fluency and their tendency toward narrative dispersion, instead of reinforcing a global imaginary that, in the end, doesn’t really need additional pivots.
In the end, saving the elephants perhaps represents the act contrary to that ideal disappearance by which Belmonte seems to renounce the human. But the narrator asks himself: “Why save the little elephants and not the little crocodiles or the chiripas? Mrs. Sheldrick has the answer to this: elephants are humans.” (p. 11) Maybe the answer lies in finding the human where we least suspect it: in seduction, in the pure desire (to help the little elephants, in this case) that will hide the absences; a hopeful gesture, perhaps, the suggests the quintessence of the human in other regions of existence, such as mercy or nobility; but one subject to the laws of the society of the spectacle: Mrs. Sheldrick will turn out to be a marketing ploy to promote the protection of the poor little animals, and with this discovery a new disappearance will end the spell the elephants cast over the narrator. It would seem that the human, after all, is destined to vanish in any of its spheres of existence, just like it’s also destined to leave behind a long trace. Therefore, the perfect disappearance, the absolute erasure of man, resides, according to Belmonte’s poetics, in assuming the inevitability of death as a vocation, as a commandment, as an explicit desire for escape; like that pilot who climbs into his plane and midway through his journey cuts off communication with the control tower, so as to then mysteriously disappear into the air.
Illustration: “The Disorganized Life of Maxim Valletin,” Christian Boltanski
{ Gabriel Payares, 500 ejemplares, 2 February 2010 }
I began to work as an artist when I began to be an adult, when I understood that my childhood was finished, and was dead. I think we all have somebody who is dead inside of us. A dead child.
–Christian Boltanski
The phrase is almost a cliché, but that doesn’t make it false: the end of childhood is the beginning of the end of life, the first step toward aging and death. Only after we have overcome childhood do we gain an awareness of death: first in relation to our parents and, eventually, through this discovery, of our own. The task of art –and of literature in particular–, when facing such a rough panorama of life, is none other than to provide man with an instant of recuperation of that lost initial stage, of that dead child mentioned in our epigraph; this is why Bataille affirmed of literature that it is “childhood finally regained.” Art, then, is a constant search for the ontology of the human, which is presumed to be lost with childhood: whether it be to preserve it, to spread it, to question it, or even to unveil it, to find the human element in reality’s most unusual corners. This, along with the awareness of one’s own finitude, and above all the capacity to visualize one’s own absence, to prepare us for it and to leave a legacy, makes art a particular disposition of the individual toward the coming absence, that is, man’s preparation for death: his own and that of others.
Such a poetics of disappearance animates the pages of the first work of fiction by the poet Luis Enrique Belmonte, the novella Salvar los elefantes (Caracas: Equinoccio, 2006). In its pages, the hot Catalonian summer serves as the ideal stage to illustrate the gradual dissipation of the world, the slow melting of a humanity that is broken and tied to itself, symbolically summarized by the protagonist’s damaged refrigerator, and at the same time transmuted, by means of media deception and televised simulacra, into the poor little African elephants that the Sheldrick Foundation promises to save.
In this manner, the anonymous protagonist of Salvar los elefantes plays the role of audience to a cruel performance of disappearance: trapped between the warm agony of his refrigerator, which exudes the stench of its own decomposition onto everything around it –a strange smell “of fermented mayonnaise” (p. 10) sticks to the striped pajamas the protagonist wears–, and the prolonged academic trip of his girlfriend Evelyne, from whom he will barely receive a couple of postcards with increasingly terse phrases –as if she herself were slowly dissipating–, the narrator seems to become more and more linked to a group of absent characters, dead, or in a steep trance toward disappearance, leaving behind the more “alive” or palpitating dynamics of existence: beginning with his anodyne sleepiness, a type of renunciation of a vital posture in the face of life –maybe only interrupted by his brief attempt to exercise by swimming, which logically culminates with a near-drowning–, and later on with his constant reference to (and even his dialogue with) actual characters whose deaths occurred amid intriguing conditions of sudden dissipation.
Thus the objects of his continuous reflection include the celebrated disappearances of Chet Baker, who died under suspicious circumstances after falling from a window in Amsterdam, or Saint Exupéry, who disappeared without a trace in a Lightning P38 airplane flying over the coast of Marseilles; along with those of several neighbors in the Barcelona neighborhood where he lives: Mrs. Cremer, consumed by the heat, or the neighbor dressed in pajamas with little snakes and arabesques. Something similar happens with the character Dumont the antiques dealer, a sort of imaginary friend to the narrator –an homage or reference to the first known aviator, the Brazilian Alberto Salas Dumont, whose suicide by hanging remains clouded by uncertain details–; and with Dr. Boltanski, the narrator’s psychiatrist –whose surname references the Jewish artist Christian Boltanski, famous for his tireless exploration of the themes of death, memory and disappearance in his many works and performances.
The experience of absence, then, takes place in the very writing of the story, understood as a type of detective work in which the aforementioned clues point not to a restitution of memory or of legacy, as would be the case in Boltanski’s installations, but rather to the consummation of disappearance itself: as though the very act of writing were providing an account of forgotten details about and by the absent ones. Writing as a remainder, a retelling of what endures, but at the same time the story of the disappearance of the writer himself. This meta-discourse makes its appearance within Belmonte’s narrative, present in the photos the protagonist obtains from an abandoned roll of film, and which exhibit the sequence of a photographic calendar of a man’s disappearance. It is a trace, undoubtedly, because the photos are the testimony of something that existed, but a trace that leads to a definitive absence, and from whose reading the narrator extracts the conclusion that, the more perfect the disappearances, the fewer traces of themselves they leave behind, the more impossible will be the existence of magic, art and writing:
How many of us haven’t felt disappointed when, at the disappearance of a dove or a parrot, the magician has been incapable of hiding the feathers that remain at the bottom of his top hat? It’s true that it would be very difficult to disappear into thin air, and that without the traces that bodies in transit leave behind detective stories wouldn’t be possible. Auguste Dupin wouldn’t have invented the police genre had it not been for the carelessness, almost always involuntary, of the turncoats. To hide the tracks, or to erase them, is one of the greatest challenges for anyone with the intention –the vocation– of disappearing. (p. 80)
Listening to the narrator himself, the novella is followed by a brief “Report Regarding the Absent,” which offers the reader various additional clues regarding certain referents that could be considered “lost” within the story. However, these annexes in the form of short stories run the risk of being unnecessary details: weakening the whole with their lack of fluency and their tendency toward narrative dispersion, instead of reinforcing a global imaginary that, in the end, doesn’t really need additional pivots.
In the end, saving the elephants perhaps represents the act contrary to that ideal disappearance by which Belmonte seems to renounce the human. But the narrator asks himself: “Why save the little elephants and not the little crocodiles or the chiripas? Mrs. Sheldrick has the answer to this: elephants are humans.” (p. 11) Maybe the answer lies in finding the human where we least suspect it: in seduction, in the pure desire (to help the little elephants, in this case) that will hide the absences; a hopeful gesture, perhaps, the suggests the quintessence of the human in other regions of existence, such as mercy or nobility; but one subject to the laws of the society of the spectacle: Mrs. Sheldrick will turn out to be a marketing ploy to promote the protection of the poor little animals, and with this discovery a new disappearance will end the spell the elephants cast over the narrator. It would seem that the human, after all, is destined to vanish in any of its spheres of existence, just like it’s also destined to leave behind a long trace. Therefore, the perfect disappearance, the absolute erasure of man, resides, according to Belmonte’s poetics, in assuming the inevitability of death as a vocation, as a commandment, as an explicit desire for escape; like that pilot who climbs into his plane and midway through his journey cuts off communication with the control tower, so as to then mysteriously disappear into the air.
Illustration: “The Disorganized Life of Maxim Valletin,” Christian Boltanski
{ Gabriel Payares, 500 ejemplares, 2 February 2010 }
10.25.2009
Acerca de por qué Alfredo Silva Estrada era un Mago de Oriente con poder y ciencia rara / Luis Enrique Belmonte
Regarding Why Alfredo Silva Estrada Was A Magician of the Orient with Rare Power and Science
1
Speaking about magicians isn’t easy, since they are prodigious by nature and what is prodigious tends to be fleeting. Magic is one of man’s deepest influences. When we encounter a magician the first thing that impresses us is his incantatory power. The spell of magicians seduces because it creates a temporal suspension of the senses, as happens when we look at a Persian carpet or at a gang of bluebirds fluttering at the window (I’m watching them right now). This is the source of the hypnotic nature of magical operations. F. Vergesen tells us that in Alfredo Silva Estrada’s poetry “the poem heads along a route where the near totality of data of sensibility, thought and the imaginary cross paths.” A poem like “En delirio de piedra,” for example, is nothing more than a prodigious verbal artifact capable of enchanting and disordering our senses. Alfredo was a delightful person; that’s why children, dogs and exalted creatures loved him and greeted him.
2
Magicians defy the possibilities of matter and subvert the order of things. They produce explosions where we least expect it. An explosion is a sudden and vivacious manifestation of something that wasn’t there and that by the force of the art of magic appears. This is the source of the sparks and illuminations in life and in Alfredo’s poetry. His poetry is like dynamite for language. It contains marvelous hidden mines that when stepped upon provoke unexpected conflagrations of the sign. They are like ritual fires: fascinating, celebratory, cathartic. Alfredo was a subversive, a rebel of forms (of “the form that in its own self liberates itself.”)
3
All acts of magic have to do with transmutation, that is, with the transformation of one thing into another. For Alfredo this was a daily practice. To transmute experience into word and the word into experience was the substrata of his alchemy. This is what he refers to when he speaks to us of “existing in the duration of the poem,” or when he wagers for “the poetic word rooted in existence itself.” This implies an ethics of language and a way of life. And his life was a transgression of the limits of expression: his poetic word sought the experimental encounter with other material worlds. That explains the approaches to the plastic arts (with Gego), to music (with Del Mónaco), to graphic design (with Leufert), or to Hertzian waves (with Ofrendas, on Radio Nacional de Venezuela, one of the longest running programs in the history of national radio). In El libro de las puertas one of his preferred poetic operations is manifested, which by the way is very closely related to transmutation: it is the transfer, the passing through what is unknown, the exploration of the edges of being to found, in the open, new spaces that might expand the possibilities of matter. We’re talking about the transmuted word. Zoroaster (or Dr. Faustus) did the same thing.
4
Simon Magus was persecuted by Saint Peter. Simon possessed the secret to levitation and Peter couldn’t stand this. They say that once Simon was trapped and taken to Rome to be tried, Peter asked him to fly and once the magician was in the air they began to throw stones at him and this is how they got rid of him. The thing is that Peter bought stones to establish churches, while Simon flew through the air establishing other kingdoms, less apprehensible, more suggestive. The poetry of our magician is light and ludic. But it turns out that when interacting with his fellow beings Alfredo was also like that. Alfredo took a lucid stance against intellectual and literary shyness. His humor erased with a spark the impostures of the serious and the pretentious. When facing the cardboard nature and prejudice of those who insist on making certain spaces hostile, Alfredo preferred to open up the vents of light and sound so as to avoid the blockade. He belonged to no court, nor did he set up obstacles for anyone. Alfredo would fly in his famous chair and sing “Alma libre” with fervor, a song that begins like this: “Like a magician of the Orient / With rare power and science / I will break the chains / That bound me without pity...”
5
Obliquity is another superpower that belongs to magicians. They tell you one thing goes here and it ends up showing up over there. They make you climb into a suitcase, for example, so as to then have you emerge from a mirror. That’s what Alfredo’s poetry is like. The phenomena of refraction appear in his work and in his life. And those reflections cast spells on us. They produce strange resonances, echoes, explosions, syncopations, cracks. You never know where a verse is taking you until you find a reflection of it somewhere else and it surprises you because you weren’t expecting it. His poetry is endless because it has that reverberational quality that’s found in acts belonging to magic. As though it were a reticularea of light.
6
Magicians generate spaces for connivance. A moment comes when those who witness an act of magic find an element of communion in wonder. Magical phenomena have an enveloping nature and they tend to set bridges of unity between beings, circuits under the auspices of shared delight and the celebration of life. Alfredo made his house a home of tolerance and brotherhood around the poetic word. He was a server of friendship. He didn’t cultivate any type of hatred and he respected human beings profoundly. Magicians radiate warmth and they tend to wink an eye at you when you are surprised by amazement.
7
Now we’ll have to talk about what is most precious for a magician: revelation. This is the true card a magician hides under his sleeve. And revelation only manifests itself to visionaries (those who can see through, the authentic revolutionaries). Alfredo is a visionary because he invites us to see what no one else has seen before. Bordering the limits he lifts himself to glance at the horizon in search of the place where the unspoken arises, because “in poetry the only thing worth saying is the unspeakable,” as Reverdy said, fifth member of the Reverdy quartet. Alfredo’s poetry is highly stimulating because it’s difficult and is full of occult codes that, thanks to patience and chance, manifest themselves to us suddenly. It’s what Alfredo called the superlife [supervivencia] of the poetic act, that is: “The surprising place of the poem with its own structure that resists, even in its vacilations and faults, all possible readings.” Because the mystery of the unspeakable is revealed to us and that mystery is as endless as the imagining consciousness.
8
To finish this indagation regarding why Alfredo Silva Estrada was a Magician of the Orient with rare power and science, all I have left to say is that magicians exist on borders and they spend their time feeling, scanning, gathering herbs from one place to plant them in another. Magicians are in contact with the hidden forces of the matter they manipulate. They are transgressors of limits (sometimes, with dynamite). They speak with the absent. They weave webs of astonishment. They proceed with joy of the bow [alegría de proa] towards the confines, well-planted in the going. We know they have always been among us. Bon Voyage! Cheers! (Greetings, Sonia.)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 24 October 2009 }
1
Speaking about magicians isn’t easy, since they are prodigious by nature and what is prodigious tends to be fleeting. Magic is one of man’s deepest influences. When we encounter a magician the first thing that impresses us is his incantatory power. The spell of magicians seduces because it creates a temporal suspension of the senses, as happens when we look at a Persian carpet or at a gang of bluebirds fluttering at the window (I’m watching them right now). This is the source of the hypnotic nature of magical operations. F. Vergesen tells us that in Alfredo Silva Estrada’s poetry “the poem heads along a route where the near totality of data of sensibility, thought and the imaginary cross paths.” A poem like “En delirio de piedra,” for example, is nothing more than a prodigious verbal artifact capable of enchanting and disordering our senses. Alfredo was a delightful person; that’s why children, dogs and exalted creatures loved him and greeted him.
2
Magicians defy the possibilities of matter and subvert the order of things. They produce explosions where we least expect it. An explosion is a sudden and vivacious manifestation of something that wasn’t there and that by the force of the art of magic appears. This is the source of the sparks and illuminations in life and in Alfredo’s poetry. His poetry is like dynamite for language. It contains marvelous hidden mines that when stepped upon provoke unexpected conflagrations of the sign. They are like ritual fires: fascinating, celebratory, cathartic. Alfredo was a subversive, a rebel of forms (of “the form that in its own self liberates itself.”)
3
All acts of magic have to do with transmutation, that is, with the transformation of one thing into another. For Alfredo this was a daily practice. To transmute experience into word and the word into experience was the substrata of his alchemy. This is what he refers to when he speaks to us of “existing in the duration of the poem,” or when he wagers for “the poetic word rooted in existence itself.” This implies an ethics of language and a way of life. And his life was a transgression of the limits of expression: his poetic word sought the experimental encounter with other material worlds. That explains the approaches to the plastic arts (with Gego), to music (with Del Mónaco), to graphic design (with Leufert), or to Hertzian waves (with Ofrendas, on Radio Nacional de Venezuela, one of the longest running programs in the history of national radio). In El libro de las puertas one of his preferred poetic operations is manifested, which by the way is very closely related to transmutation: it is the transfer, the passing through what is unknown, the exploration of the edges of being to found, in the open, new spaces that might expand the possibilities of matter. We’re talking about the transmuted word. Zoroaster (or Dr. Faustus) did the same thing.
4
Simon Magus was persecuted by Saint Peter. Simon possessed the secret to levitation and Peter couldn’t stand this. They say that once Simon was trapped and taken to Rome to be tried, Peter asked him to fly and once the magician was in the air they began to throw stones at him and this is how they got rid of him. The thing is that Peter bought stones to establish churches, while Simon flew through the air establishing other kingdoms, less apprehensible, more suggestive. The poetry of our magician is light and ludic. But it turns out that when interacting with his fellow beings Alfredo was also like that. Alfredo took a lucid stance against intellectual and literary shyness. His humor erased with a spark the impostures of the serious and the pretentious. When facing the cardboard nature and prejudice of those who insist on making certain spaces hostile, Alfredo preferred to open up the vents of light and sound so as to avoid the blockade. He belonged to no court, nor did he set up obstacles for anyone. Alfredo would fly in his famous chair and sing “Alma libre” with fervor, a song that begins like this: “Like a magician of the Orient / With rare power and science / I will break the chains / That bound me without pity...”
5
Obliquity is another superpower that belongs to magicians. They tell you one thing goes here and it ends up showing up over there. They make you climb into a suitcase, for example, so as to then have you emerge from a mirror. That’s what Alfredo’s poetry is like. The phenomena of refraction appear in his work and in his life. And those reflections cast spells on us. They produce strange resonances, echoes, explosions, syncopations, cracks. You never know where a verse is taking you until you find a reflection of it somewhere else and it surprises you because you weren’t expecting it. His poetry is endless because it has that reverberational quality that’s found in acts belonging to magic. As though it were a reticularea of light.
6
Magicians generate spaces for connivance. A moment comes when those who witness an act of magic find an element of communion in wonder. Magical phenomena have an enveloping nature and they tend to set bridges of unity between beings, circuits under the auspices of shared delight and the celebration of life. Alfredo made his house a home of tolerance and brotherhood around the poetic word. He was a server of friendship. He didn’t cultivate any type of hatred and he respected human beings profoundly. Magicians radiate warmth and they tend to wink an eye at you when you are surprised by amazement.
7
Now we’ll have to talk about what is most precious for a magician: revelation. This is the true card a magician hides under his sleeve. And revelation only manifests itself to visionaries (those who can see through, the authentic revolutionaries). Alfredo is a visionary because he invites us to see what no one else has seen before. Bordering the limits he lifts himself to glance at the horizon in search of the place where the unspoken arises, because “in poetry the only thing worth saying is the unspeakable,” as Reverdy said, fifth member of the Reverdy quartet. Alfredo’s poetry is highly stimulating because it’s difficult and is full of occult codes that, thanks to patience and chance, manifest themselves to us suddenly. It’s what Alfredo called the superlife [supervivencia] of the poetic act, that is: “The surprising place of the poem with its own structure that resists, even in its vacilations and faults, all possible readings.” Because the mystery of the unspeakable is revealed to us and that mystery is as endless as the imagining consciousness.
8
To finish this indagation regarding why Alfredo Silva Estrada was a Magician of the Orient with rare power and science, all I have left to say is that magicians exist on borders and they spend their time feeling, scanning, gathering herbs from one place to plant them in another. Magicians are in contact with the hidden forces of the matter they manipulate. They are transgressors of limits (sometimes, with dynamite). They speak with the absent. They weave webs of astonishment. They proceed with joy of the bow [alegría de proa] towards the confines, well-planted in the going. We know they have always been among us. Bon Voyage! Cheers! (Greetings, Sonia.)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 24 October 2009 }
9.25.2009
Escribo / Luis Enrique Belmonte
I Write
I write to scare off debt collectors
and to slip through the cracks of grey days
I write to understand those who suddenly lose their voice
and to listen to the cord played by the desert wind
and to lose what I have and to win and lose again
I write so the gypsies will take me with them.
Cuartos de alquiler (2005)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila, 2009 }
I write to scare off debt collectors
and to slip through the cracks of grey days
I write to understand those who suddenly lose their voice
and to listen to the cord played by the desert wind
and to lose what I have and to win and lose again
I write so the gypsies will take me with them.
Cuartos de alquiler (2005)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila, 2009 }
9.23.2009
No me escribas, por favor / Luis Enrique Belmonte
Please, Don’t Write Me
Please, don’t write me,
because I can’t read your handwriting
and I’m scared of sealed envelopes
and I don’t wanna die in a mailbox
and I can’t stand snow or bridges
nor that distant mandolin music in my room.
Cuartos de alquiler (2005)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
Please, don’t write me,
because I can’t read your handwriting
and I’m scared of sealed envelopes
and I don’t wanna die in a mailbox
and I can’t stand snow or bridges
nor that distant mandolin music in my room.
Cuartos de alquiler (2005)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
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